Back when I had the benefit of RAs [human] it was much the same task as I use AI now: try to cut couple hundred words here, give it a read for intuition there, look up some cites, help with lit review etc. I don't know if that was overreliance for faculty, but it was what I did as a grad student ("I learned by watching you dad!")
I still regularly find straight up typos in *headlines* in major pubs (ex: NYT, Politico, etc). Editors may want to try a little less preciousness until they can fix their own copyediting. Not to mention they've drastically cut copyeditors and substantive editors to begin with, so something’s gotta substitute for that!
Plus as long as academic journal editors still expect 10 pages of superfluous literature review, better believe I ain't got time for that.
"The presence of AI does not prove the absence of a human." That seems to distill this long post.
From a reader/user perspective, I don't care who said or did something, unless it is based on their status or authority. The question is whether it is correct; whether it conforms to reality (even good fiction conforms to reality in its own way).
But from a credit/reward perspective, it does matter who did it. Machines don't get PhDs; people do. That works the other way, too: if AI detects better, give me the AI, not the PhD. The pay and prestige people get is related to what they get credit for.
The mixing of human and machine muddies the latter, not the former. Business deals with this as an increase in productivity. That is not so easily done where quality matters as much or more than quantity.
Great and thoughtful essay. There's an unstated bias in how writers have responded to AI. Most people with successful Substack accounts (strong presence, lots of well-cited journal articles, books, etc.) are probably both good writers and take to it easily. To them, banning AI is like a shop rule that limits competition. While they point to 'AI slop,' there's an equal or larger amount of human slop. We just don't have to look at it often, and eventually people who aren't gifted writers quit trying to write. AI is reducing the cost of writing well, which threatens those who can do it well without assistance. Another analogy (and admittedly, most analogies are lame) is the autopilot on airplanes. Useful, no one much seems to object that their jet plane flight was almost entirely managed by computers and electronic controls. Most of us also do want our pilot to be able to take over in an emergency. (I wrote this with Grammarly checking my spelling -- I don't touch-type, and I've always been a horrendous speller).
*slow clap*
Back when I had the benefit of RAs [human] it was much the same task as I use AI now: try to cut couple hundred words here, give it a read for intuition there, look up some cites, help with lit review etc. I don't know if that was overreliance for faculty, but it was what I did as a grad student ("I learned by watching you dad!")
I still regularly find straight up typos in *headlines* in major pubs (ex: NYT, Politico, etc). Editors may want to try a little less preciousness until they can fix their own copyediting. Not to mention they've drastically cut copyeditors and substantive editors to begin with, so something’s gotta substitute for that!
Plus as long as academic journal editors still expect 10 pages of superfluous literature review, better believe I ain't got time for that.
"The presence of AI does not prove the absence of a human." That seems to distill this long post.
From a reader/user perspective, I don't care who said or did something, unless it is based on their status or authority. The question is whether it is correct; whether it conforms to reality (even good fiction conforms to reality in its own way).
But from a credit/reward perspective, it does matter who did it. Machines don't get PhDs; people do. That works the other way, too: if AI detects better, give me the AI, not the PhD. The pay and prestige people get is related to what they get credit for.
The mixing of human and machine muddies the latter, not the former. Business deals with this as an increase in productivity. That is not so easily done where quality matters as much or more than quantity.
Great and thoughtful essay. There's an unstated bias in how writers have responded to AI. Most people with successful Substack accounts (strong presence, lots of well-cited journal articles, books, etc.) are probably both good writers and take to it easily. To them, banning AI is like a shop rule that limits competition. While they point to 'AI slop,' there's an equal or larger amount of human slop. We just don't have to look at it often, and eventually people who aren't gifted writers quit trying to write. AI is reducing the cost of writing well, which threatens those who can do it well without assistance. Another analogy (and admittedly, most analogies are lame) is the autopilot on airplanes. Useful, no one much seems to object that their jet plane flight was almost entirely managed by computers and electronic controls. Most of us also do want our pilot to be able to take over in an emergency. (I wrote this with Grammarly checking my spelling -- I don't touch-type, and I've always been a horrendous speller).